


On the Bird Roads

by kafokasdia



Category: Mortal Engines (2018), Mortal Engines Series - Philip Reeve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:07:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23752813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kafokasdia/pseuds/kafokasdia
Summary: Stories of the wider World of Mortal Engines.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	On the Bird Roads

From the dry North Sea to the grand Sahara, cities have ground most of this world into wasted monotony, but no landscape matches the north-western Hunting Ground for soggy, soulless tedium. I finished a long, fruitless scan across three hundred degrees of despairing grey-green flatness, recalled the old saw about half the joy of flying being the view from the flight deck windows, and revised that down by forty-nine per cent.

The _Aspen 20_ was cruising at a little shy of fifteen hundred metres; if anything had been alive down there, it might have picked us out as a forest-green dot, lost among a flock of woolly-backed altocumulus. Our shadow and theirs slid together across the wasteland and the cold, choppy inlets of the Skagerrak Sea. Few enough cities bothered to come to this grey, mournful part of the world, fewer still at this grey, mournful time of the year.

The maps of these parts were hopeless. I suppose navigation must have been easier before Traction, when things stayed in one place long enough for it to be worth marking them down. There was a sorry excuse for a forest down there, five or six years’ worth of wart birch, but eventually some fuel-hungry town would amble over and erase it with chainsaw mandibles. We had flown over a river that morning, but that meant nothing either; rivers change course every year, dammed or redirected by the deep track-marks of heavyweight cities. Only mountains last long enough to make it to the charts, but between the volcanoes that sprouted at random and the mining towns with their wolfram-tipped jaw drills, even those have an uneasy impermanence.

Most obviously, I suppose, before Traction, making your way to a city wouldn’t have meant _hunting_ the damned thing.

“Advise we turn to bearing 050,” murmured Argon Thomson, my navigator, and crossed another grid square off his illuminated easel.

“050, aye,” I replied, and fed the engines a little more power to compensate for the wind. I had for some days been nursing doubts about the grid, about the search pattern, and about Thomson's entire claim to have developed a new, scientific method of urban surveying. For a week now, we'd seen nothing except a vague three-funnelled silhouette on the horizon that might have been Schwimmstadt Emden. There had already been one long, awkward argument about this approach, before I'd given in and agreed to do it his way for ten days. There was another one coming.

“Boss, can we swing low for a bit? Catch you a fish supper?” That was Braganza, the engineer. He’d been raised among the piranha towns of the Amazon, and was rightly proud of his talents as a mechanic, knife-man, fisherman and liar. But there was little chance for him to use any of them at the moment. The engines, a pair of Stoianev 825s, were running sweetly in this cold, dense northern air. He called them Abril and Bella, and doted on them with regular overhauls and expensive lubricants.

“We’re here for cities, Xavi,” I told him gently. “Not herring.”

“But it’s been tins and biscuit since Vik!" he whined. "The body needs something fresh.”

I smiled, and shifted in the ancient cracked leather of the conn chair. “Sparks, how much would it cost us to go down to fishing level right now?”

Thomson frowned, and popped the earphones off his bald head. “Currency?”

“Dealer’s choice.”

“Nominal fuel for adjustments, say ten units of luftgaz for timely descent; cheaper to dump ballast than reinflate, but that would degrade our endurance and safety margin. I would not be afraid to say… ninety pengo for an hour.”

“Ninety pengo these fish will cost us. What cash value of fish do you think our esteemed flight mechanic will be able to catch in an hour?”

“I… would prefer not to be drawn on this matter.”

“Know the word for people who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing?” said Braganza acidly. He twirled the hook around in a way that was probably meant to look devil-may-care; it stuck fast in his clothes.

“Rational?” said Thomson, donning the headphones again. And then, “Contact! Bearing 038.”

I snatched the headphones from him, and heard a staticky, brassy fizz at the edge of perception. Homing beacon. Thomson turned to me, eyes shining, and I realised then how much of himself he'd put into the grid and the survey method, how glad he was that it had finally paid off.

"I suspect, Captain, that we have found our prize," he said, and we were both smiling. Abril and Bella roared with excitement as I opened the throttle.

Braganza cast a wistful look back at the sea as he tried to extricate hook from overalls. “Sadsack northern fish are probably all scales and poison anyway,” he muttered, and yelped as he stabbed his finger on the hook.

It was the prize, all right. Radom Napędowy, a four-decker, at that awkward stage in a city’s life where it was small enough that most serious predators would swallow it whole, but large enough that none would pass it over as a meal. In response, it had made itself as inconspicuous as one could reasonably make a million tonnes of mobile city. The city’s tracks were unusually wide for its weight, leaving tracks fainter and shallower than most, and the edge of each of its tiers was painted with a set of false white snowlines, breaking up its low, squat outline.

Dark wooden roofs crowded the top tier, high-density residential blocks with paint flaking off their corrugated sides filled out the middle. I made out the famous piggery districts on the aft base tier, hundreds of pens full of little pink shapes, and wondered what the smell was like down there. It was bad enough from an airship.

There was only one other vessel in the air-harbour as we arrived, but it was one I recognised: the _Wirbelwind_ , Amalia von Nürnburg’s privateer gunship. From the racks of slim air-to-air rockets tucked under the _Wirbelwind’s_ crimson envelope, she wasn't here to hunt ptarmigan. Amalia was a friend, though, or had been last time I'd seen her.

All official business in Radom took place in one building, the Ratusz on Tier One, and thanks to efficiency savings all visitors had to negotiate with a single reception desk, manned by an indifferent crone with terrible hearing and worse teeth. I spent an hour in a queue of locals collecting ration books, huddled up to a wall against the Tier One winds. Inside, the carved wooden rafters had been painted a dull institutional yellow, and the steam radiators pumped out such a ferocious heat that all the windows and fire-escape doors were propped open. Eventually, I was granted an audience with a whey-faced excise officer. His pencil was well-chewed, his forms on much-recycled paper, his Airsperanto excellent but grudging, his questions peremptory. “You will give me names of ship and crew.”

“ _Aspen 20_ , twin-engined light freighter. Captain Alya Rosetta, commanding. Navigator Argon Thomson. Flight engineer Xavier Braganza.”

“Cargo.”

I slid the manifest across the plywood table. “Grade 2 antifreeze from the Dortmund Conurbation, fluid beef from the Palatinate, a lot of letters. Someone on Airhaven really misses a lady called Justyna.”

He took his time signing over the docking permits, scrutinising each page before stamping it. I had practised this bit at length, so when he handed it all back I ruffled the documents, hesitated, bit my lip, and at length looked the officer straight in the eye.

“I was offered much more than a reasonable price for the antifreeze,” I began. “There’s more where that came from before winter, if it’s what your city needs. But… it’s a devil of a time finding you out here. Would you be able to give me a point to meet? In a month’s time, say?”

“You cannot expect us to share course information,” he said blandly. “These are not trusting days.”

“I don’t want a course schedule!” I laughed. “I’m not after an exact location. Just give me the vaguest idea, I can do the rest. That’s what airships are for.”

A gold half-sovereign appeared on the table in front of the customs officer. “Make it a bit easier for a tramp trader? Times are hard all over.”

The coin disappeared, but the face didn’t change. “Goodbye, Captain Rosetta.”

I nearly spat, but recomposed myself into businesslike dignity. _Fine_ , I thought. _We’ll have to do it the hard way._

I walked the chilly streets for a while before finding a milk bar with a happy painted pig on its sign. "Kwas," offered the man behind the counter. "Pig milk kumys. Tea. You want spirits, go to Pawel’s Corner." I ordered tea, and dumplings with skwarki, and settled down to think. Plan B was the usual: bars and merchants' unions, making friends in mid-level places and asking the right oblique questions. Plan C was workable, from what I’d seen at the Ratusz, but involved more risks than I liked the look of.

The door jangled and Amalia von Nürnberg swept in amid a gust of cold, pig-scented air. Her golden hair was clipped short to fit under a flying helmet; she wore a silver-belted chokha coat the same red as the Wirbelwind’s envelope, and calf-length boots polished to a mirror shine. I am not naturally self-conscious, but couldn’t help but feel a little scruffy in my fleecy jacket and stained valenki. She came straight for me; she had always been the most direct of women.

“Captain Rosetta. It’s been a long time,” she said, in Airsperanto. “What brings you to Radom?”

"Oh, business, you know," I said. "This is…?"

“My husband.” A huge man, pale and bearded, wearing an overcoat that could be hiding a spare airship. “Are you still flying with the bald waif and the glutton?”

"Now now," I returned, "I'm not rude about _your_ crew."

She laughed once, a brief, fierce noise. "Have you tried the kumys? A local specialty. Come, we have three for a bottle!”

“You're braver than I am,” I replied. Another laugh. She ordered two glasses of the hideous-smelling yoghurty stuff. Her silent husband gave me a look of some fellow-feeling as it arrived. Amalia took a long draught without any apparent disgust, wiped away a milky little moustache and turned back to me.

“I will repeat myself once because you are a friend,” she said. “Not twice. What brings you to Radom?”

"Trading," I said moodily. "Freight work, tramping around moving anything for anyone. It's a living. You?"

"Honourable combat," declared Amalia. “You have heard, no doubt, of the Huntsmen of Arkangel? Or the Attitude Adjusters? Thugs who attack cities, immobilise them for their masters to come and eat. These aerial pirates and ruffians, they make a mockery of the entire system of Municipal Darwinism. So. The elders of Radom pay us to protect this city, to see that the playing field is kept level.”

I tried not to stare. Probing Amalia for an idea of the city's course was not, I realised, going to be a goer. She had grown up on Jagdstadt Magdeburg, a bastion of full-throated Tractionism, but I'd never realised how much of it she’d brought along with her to the Bird Roads.

She, meanwhile, had no compunction at all about staring. "So. May I ask, what cargo are you bringing? Where are you heading next?"

I stood up quickly. “I don’t like your tone.”

"Alya-"

“I’ve never taken predator’s gold. Never have, never will. Do you know what that kind of suspicion does to little traders like me?" My anger and indignation were real enough, and I prayed she wouldn't see through it to the guilt beneath. "You want to see my cargo manifests? Ask your new employer.”

Amalia thawed a little. “No, of course. I overstepped. May I apologise to you? We have good weissen on the-”

“Not tonight,” I said, and the door jangled behind me.

So much for Plan B, then.

The Inżynierowie building on the top tier was a marvellously designed fantasia of wrought-iron, glass and painted chimneys. Fresnel-lensed searchlights and metal gargoyles roosted on its shoulders. Thomson’s letter of introduction as a journeyman engineer had got him through the doors, and his polite enquiries had brought him to Inżynier Turska, who had almost immediately agreed to show him her digester.

Most cities’ engineer castes were secretive with their inventions, but Turska was far too proud of her machine to hold back. Down on the base tier, an infinity of pipes coiled and kinked around one another. The digester wheezed out gusts of chemical smells, punctuating the underlying stink of the pig slurry that was piped in at one end and the ammoniac tang of the fertiliser pellets that appeared at the other. Turska was a small, cheery woman with clever green eyes and a fine grasp of Anglish and Airsperanto. She pointed out the methane traps, the ammonia siphons, the settling tanks that used the city’s vibrations to speed the separation process. “Pig decks!” she trilled happily. “We have outdone the alchemists of ancient days, who sought to turn muck into gold. We feed them on birch leaves and underdeck mushrooms. The methane and the fertiliser keep this whole town going, the bacon is just a bonus.”

Thomson made impressed noises. “István Nagy posited that the pig and the mushroom could form the basis of a perfectly sealed subterranean ecosystem.”

She offered him a tray of round yellow-brown pellets. “Mixed with sawdust and compressed, the finest fertiliser in the Hunting Ground. There have been plans for a new farming deck on Tier Two for ten years now. Ah, we could grow such magnificent cabbages, if only we had the prey…”

“And you use exhaust from the city-engines to maintain mesophilic temperatures?” he said, returning the tray gingerly.

“Exactly!” she said. “My cousin Jerzy works in the engine district, and they were happy to run a pipe through here. That imbecile Mickiewicz burns half his methane keeping the temperature up. Terrible safety risk.”

A companionable, pungent silence settled. “You pick this up very quickly, for a man who’s never seen such a machine before,” she said after a while. “But might that be expected of a London Engineer?”

She cast a shy but meaningful glance at Thomson’s forehead, where his bandanna covered that spot between the eyes where a Guild-mark might have been. A longer silence fell, broken by a hideous blurp from the digester.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but there’s no such place as London anymore.”

A little after midnight, Grześki Mickiewicz’ slurry reactor experienced a catastrophic overpressure incident. The reactor – a larger, more ambitious version of Inżynier Turska’s neighbouring digester – contained a complex equilibrium of forces, represented and controlled by a set of dials and levers in the control booth hanging from the belly of Tier Two. There was supposed to be someone on duty at all times, but Mickiewicz was having fun at Pawel’s Corner, and his crew were too afraid of him to remind him it was his shift. The mad aviator, the bald man in the bandanna, had been drinking all night with old Turska, the two claiming they could discern the precise proof of various vodkas by taste. Each time the glass slammed down and the percentage was slurred out to three significant figures, everyone cheered. Turska drank the foreigner under the table, and everyone cheered at that, too.

There were many potential points of failure to the reactor, and nobody ever worked out that one of the methane valves had been tampered with. Gradually, the pressure gauge inched up. Gradually, the lights dimmed, starved of their direct feed. Rivets strained. Whistles blew. Pipes bulged. The high-pressure gas was not hot enough to ignite on its own, but Mickiewicz never bothered to turn the lights off and when a pipe finally ruptured, it blew a jet of methane straight onto one of the lamps. Thus, a little after midnight, Radom woke to a flat _boom_ and a soft rain of burning pig shit. Nobody was hurt, but chaos and panic reigned all night, and everyone was kept busy snuffing out the smelly little secondary fires that had nestled in the city’s gables from the base tier piggeries right up to Wysoki Square; it had been quite an explosion.

Once Mickiewicz had been woken up and realised the full scale of property damage, he had furiously demanded that the city police investigate. They started, of course, with the usual suspects: the outsiders. The Germans in the red airship were declared above suspicion by the Ratusz, which left the forest-green trader. A trusted witness had seen the captain moongazing way up on Top Tier at the time, before he’d lost her in the chaos. A score of hung-over regulars at Pawel’s Corner would swear blearily to the navigator’s whereabouts. The mechanic had been found fast asleep in the gondola of the airship, muttering something about fish; he had no alibi but responded to questioning with such absolute and genuine confusion they quickly gave up. But the attention clearly made the crew of the green ship feel a little unwelcome. The captain went to the police chief for permission to depart, and after taking on cargo - a few crates of fertiliser pellets and pork scratchings, a few letters for the exchange at Airhaven - they took off into a sky still streaked by pungent smoke.

I had worked the aft cabin of the _Aspen 20_ into a state of perfect darkness. Blackout curtains at the porthole, blankets at the door, patches over the rivet holes. Only a dim red light from a filtered bulb showed the photograph slowly taking form in its bath of chemical developer. I moved it from tray to sloshing, pungent-smelling tray, fixed it and washed it, and pegged it up with the others.

The photos were good work, for low light in a hurry. Here was the central hall of the Ratusz, a warm-up shot to check the little camera was working. Here was a folder, contents quickly laid out on a table. Text, most typed, some handwritten, in dense technical Slavic. Another. Another. Blueprints, course schedules, carefully arranged numbers from a handful of files. Two pages to a photograph, large enough and fine enough to read. Thirty shots in all; I couldn't have chanced any more.

Slipping into the Ratusz through an open fire escape had been easy. The clerks were bored, tired, not paid well enough to bother locking their filing cabinets. Half of what I was looking for had already been on show.

I sealed the photos up in their drying cabinet, and went aft for fresh air and daylight.

The _Aspen 20_ hovered ten metres above some nameless lake in the new-growth taiga. The engines hummed gently, barely needed to keep us on station. A pair of legs in overalls dangled from the stern gallery, and a fish hook splashed down.

“Any bites?” I said, sidling in beside Braganza.

He indicated the deck beside him, and the shining silver fish which pointedly did not lie there. “You should have seen the six that got away.”

“No fish supper?”

“ _Desculpa_.”

“Still, I think you’ve earned your keep,” I said, and ruffled his greasy hair affectionately. “Good work.”

He dismissed that with a wave. “A joint effort. Sparks told me which nuts to unscrew.”

We lay back on the sun-warmed planks of the gallery, and shared a companionable silence as the fish below ignored his hook. “Strange, isn’t it?" he said after a while. "The feeling after."

“It is.” I'd spent all day bubbling with nameless emotions, a sort of dual sense of hollowness and elation. The most tense part of my night had been slipping out of the Ratusz, forty minutes after the explosion, when the peak of the panic had passed and anyone could walk back and ask questions. But the night staff were all fighting fires, and I had walked unnoticed back to the air-harbour, the crescendo of adrenaline dying down inside me.

“Still. I think we did it well. Clean in and out."

Something on his face changed. "I'm not sure about that," he said slowly, and pointed at a patch of western sky where, far above, a crimson airship was setting up an attack run.

Thomson was napping in his seat when I stormed into the flight deck. “Sparks, altitude!” I bawled at him. “Get me three thousand. Dump as much ballast as it takes.” He acted with commendable speed. A tonne of water, the entire washing and cooking supply, sluiced out of the _Aspen 20's_ belly. We soared.

“Xavi, helm. How hard can we run the twins before they overheat?”

“In this air?” He grinned. “Let me open her up, boss.”

I nodded. The Stoianevs howled. The ship lurched appreciably forwards before he adjusted the trim. “Course?”

I leaned out of the cabin to get a good look aft. The _Wirbelwind_ was there, a good way upwind and now not far above us. A rocket tore out to windward and detonated: _heave to_.

The _Wirbelwind_ was smaller, faster, handled better heading straight into the wind, and she would have been straight on us in a power dive. The _Aspen 20_ had more knots tucked away than you’d guess to look at her, but her big draggy envelope was bad news in a headlong chase. And while I secretly shared Xavi’s fondness for Abril and Bella, they were made for cruising, not racing.

“Straight downwind," I ordered. "She’s got the weather gage on us. She set up for a fight, not for a chase.”

“Silly her,” he grunted. “So we’re running?”

I thought, briefly, about cooperating, and then about the darkroom. Could I ditch or hide the supplies in time? No. If Amalia got aboard she couldn't be stopped. It wasn’t pragmatism with her, it was a matter of honour.

I took a long, deep breath.

“I’m going aft. Sparks, bring me the signal lamp, the gun and the fire extinguisher.”

The heliograph was ready first, a lovely brass-cased _Blinkgerät_ with a Panzerstadt-Bayreuth makers’ mark. I checked the shutter mechanism, lit it up and carefully sent GET OFF MY TAIL.

HEAVE TO AND BE BOARDED flashed out from the _Wirbelwind’s_ gondola.

NOT ON UR NELLY, I sent. That didn’t get a response, so I followed up with THAT MEANS NO. Y R U CHASING ME.

The red airship was inching closer, but not as fast as it would have been into the wind. Amalia had misjudged the attack run. She’d let herself be drawn into a downwind chase. The _Wirbelwind_ was fast, and tough, and heavily armed, but at this range and this angle there was nothing it could really do except close the gap and pop off speculative rockets. Whereas the _Aspen 20_ …

Armament had been discussed at length at our last refit. Thomson had had no end of opinions about the relative odds of engagement, the impact on profit margins and performance envelopes from hauling half a tonne of rockets around, not to mention the safety aspect. He had been on the verge of making graphs before, half convinced and all bored, I agreed to sell the rocket projectors. One careful owner and, admittedly, never fired.

We had the gun instead, and I unrolled it from its canvas bag and laid it down on the aft deck while Thomson cranked up the pressure in the extinguisher and hosed down the envelope above us. It was a Zrínyi LVF-20, as tall as a man and half as heavy, with cartridges as thick as my wrist and a brass telescope almost the length of its barrel. To reduce the risk of fire, the Bokanyivaros gunsmith had welded on a flash suppressor that made it look like a very aggressive trombone. But it still wasn’t something I wanted to fire near a big bag of luftgaz unless I had to. It wasn’t something I wanted to fire _at_ a big bag of luftgaz unless I had to.

I tried the signal lamp again. MATCH SPEEDS AND WE’LL TALK.

HEAVE TO AND WE’LL TALK, replied the _Wirbelwind_.

So I lay down, put the red-nosed tracer into the breech and rotated the grip home. The pistol grip was also the bolt handle, a clever weight-saving innovation presumably devised by a moron with three arms.

I aimed, and took a very long time deciding to pull the trigger. When at last I did, it made a loud click, but nothing more. I pulled the cartridge out and hurled it off the back of the airship with considerable rancour. “Dud primer,” said Thomson helpfully, and passed me another.

This time, it slammed back hard against my shoulder. The report was like being punched in both ears. A fist-sized cinder, searing red even in daylight, went straight past the Wirbelwind’s gondola, even closer than I wanted.

TURN BACK I DONT WANT 2 BURN U.

The _Wirbelwind_ responded. The starboard projector puffed steam and a rocket leapt out. Three quarters of the way between us, it ran out of fuel and tumbled, falling to the land far, far below. Still a few minutes out of range.

I fired another warning shot, this time decently wide. NEVER TOOK PREDATORS GOLD, I signalled. NEVER HAVE NEVER WILL.

If the _Wirbelwind_ didn’t turn back, I'd have to knock out one of its engines, maybe both. That was a dangerous line to cross. Amalia, I was pretty certain, meant to disable the _Aspen_ _20_ and force us down. But the effective range at which she could do that - the range where an aimed rocket could safely hit an engine – was a lot closer than the range the _Wirbelwind_ would need to simply send a rocket into the gasbag and turn the _Aspen 20_ into a terribly overengineered flying crematorium. And if Amalia felt genuinely threatened, she would shoot to kill.

So if I was going to go for her engine, it had to be now, before the red airship had motive _and_ opportunity.

TRUST ME.

There was another option. It wouldn’t be too hard, at this point, to put a few tracers into the _Wirbelwind’s_ red envelope and see the whole thing drop in flaming ruins. It would be murder, the pointless murder of someone who’d once been a friend.

OR DONT.

I fired a last warning shot. The _Wirbelwind_ , at last, put its nose down and headed towards the earth: unequivocal refusal to continue the chase.

I ejected the case. “Sparks, how many rounds do we have left?”

“That was the last one.”

I lay on the deck and let out a huge, long, shuddering sigh of relief. My fingers were very, very cold and my teeth were chattering. My shoulder hurt, and my hair stank of cordite.

“Warm up the samovar and get us back on course," I said. "Then you and I are going to have a chat about rational weight savings.”

A hundred kilometres east and a few decades ago, the land had burst without warning into a rash of volcanoes. They were done erupting for now, and clustered together, black and sulphurous, like a clutch of very bad eggs. Among their ashy foothills, some quirk of volcanism had formed an L-shaped valley, broad and flat-bottomed, mostly hidden from the Hunting Ground by a blind corner. Within it, long rows of beets and potatoes made lush green tracks against the black soil, attended by little sub-suburb gantries. And watching over it all sat the semi-static Müüsleri-rattad, covered in camo netting, nestled into the valley's north side.

There was no homing beacon; Thomson flashed out our recognition signal, and took a lack of incoming rockets as an invitation to proceed.

“Spuds are coming along well,” I said by way of greeting, in the stave hall where the mayor lived and worked. Through an open lancet window, I could see steam boiling up from the distillery district. "Booze, too."

Rudi Jänks was a humourless, paranoid man in late middle age. I'd always found that mentioning alcohol was the only reliable to get him talking. “Antifreeze for the blood," he agreed, pouring two glasses. "All the northern Hunting Ground will enjoy our hard work, if they don’t come over and eat us first.”

Past the fuming stills, what looked like a dismounted drilling rig was gnawing into the side of a volcano in an ill-advised sort of way. "A heat mine," Rudi said, noticing my gaze. “Our engineers think they have discovered a controlled way to tap the warmth of the earth. Vast fuel savings in winter.”

“The big tent?”

“A burn ward. We still have a way to go."

I let him empty one glass and pour another. He was clearly in a reflective mood, and enjoying having an outsider to talk to. "Four years here," he went on. "Each year, it becomes harder to uproot. I fear we are gathering moss." That was nonsense; I'd seen the recent trackmarks. The town was ready to flee at a moment's notice. Perhaps the people weren't.

I smiled. “Well, you're safe here for the moment. I can say with certainty that Radom isn’t heading for the mountains this side of winter.”

“Persuade me,” he said simply. I opened the envelope – a fold of spare gasbag fabric, actually - and showed him my homework.

“Housing bureau," I said, laying down a photograph. "The truth is, they don’t have room for any more population. It’s tenuous, but I don’t think they’re on the hunt.” It was tenuous, and I had better material. I passed him a second sheet. “Feed and stock numbers. They’re going to have to stick to vegetation to lay in feed for their current pig numbers, or they’ll have to slaughter half their stock, and that would be a terrible waste; nobody can eat that much black pudding. Of course, you have enough feed here – they’d love your potatoes, but they don’t know you’re here. So that means south, not north.” Still no reaction. I got out the trump card.

“Engineering specs for an improved screw drive. That’s bog equipment, you’re in rocky uplands. They’re going to refit and try their luck with the marsh towns on the Skagerrak coast. Rigged like that, they wouldn’t come anywhere near you.”

He still hadn’t reacted. I pressed my case. “Radom is out. They're dreaming of prey, but it's just a dream, like it is for most cities their size around here. The rest in these parts…" I ticked off cities on my fingers, throwing out intelligence that had cost countless hours and drinks. “Most of the medium-sized cities have headed south for the winter or started to build storm shields. Ivangorod will be digesting Narva for six months. Wolfsburg is nursing a snapped axle and in no shape to chase anyone. Nothing else is both big enough to take you and hungry enough to come poking around here. Maybe you’ll get some outside context predator chased here from a far corner of the Hunting Ground, but,” I shrugged: _what can you do_.

He waited for a long, long moment, then took a small purse from the desk. It clinked satisfyingly.

I didn’t take it. “This hasn’t been an easy job. We got chased. The hold is empty.” Two true but unrelated facts. A few tonnes of Radom’s finest pig-themed trade goods were stashed safely under a cairn a league away.

“You were pursued?”

“We changed course, obviously.”

He held my gaze, then produced a golden pen and scribbled out a chit. “Take this to Tuomas at the stills. I’m sure we can spare enough vodka and instant mash to compensate you.” I nodded gratitude.

“And, Captain?” he said. “Not many could do what you do. Have you considered making a living of it?”

I jingled the purse. “I thought that’s what I was already doing.”

He wrote an Airhaven address. “There will be a letter in the usual place, next time we need you. Until then… go here, should work become scarce.”

I emerged into eggy-smelling afternoon light, pockets weighed down and heart buoyed up, just in time for everything to go mad. A fierce roar of engines filled the valley and the _Wirbelwind_ descended on the air-harbour, rockets from hilltop batteries bursting belatedly in the sky behind it. The red gunship reversed its props and slewed into a perfect pinnacle landing. Amalia von Nürnburg leapt from its gondola with the poise of a cat and stalked across the docking pan towards me, sword drawn, coattails flying. “You _shot_ at me,” she hissed.

“We both know I aimed to miss, pal.” I’d never seen Amalia use her sword, but she was probably very good with it. I had a gas pistol somewhere in one of these pockets, which I'd never really trusted. Was it loaded? Best not to even think about it. Weird, intrusive thoughts about what the blade would feel like kept interfering with my concentration.

Amalia swung with viper speed. The flat whacked into my hand, and the gasbag-parcel fell open onto the deck. Photographs fluttered in the chilly air. She stabbed one and snatched it from the sword tip, one eye still on me. “What the hell is this?”

“If you want to keep your mates at Radom safe, you’ll tidy those up,” I said.

“You tidy them up. And then give them to me.” I sighed, and started gathering photos.

“I don’t know what’s worse, the shooting or the lies.” Amalia was taking it personally. Damn her, she’d already figured it out. The sword didn’t waver. Her posture was disgustingly good. Müüsleri-rattad militia with gas carbines and harpoon guns were gathering at the edge of the docking pan, but they held back.

“I told you, I never took predator’s gold,” I said. “Prey’s gold, maybe. It’s hard enough down here.”

“It is not _right_ ,” said Amalia. “It perverts the course of Municipal Darwinism.”

“Does it? Evolution doesn’t just take one form, you know. Cunning counts too.” I risked a look up at her cold, pale face. No hint of agreement. But no stab either; plausibly I'd made a point. “So, are you going to go back to Radom and tell them where this place is? Redress the balance, so to speak?”

Amalia looked disgusted at the very thought. “Of course not.”

“Because all I’m telling them – all _this_ tells them –“ I shoved the sheaf of photographs into the privateer’s open hand, and kept the cloth – “is that they’re probably safe for the winter. Nobody is ending up in anyone else’s jaws. Nobody gets hurt, and I get paid.”

Another long, silent moment while I waited for someone else to decide my future. I was getting absolutely sick of those. “Perhaps,” said Amalia, “you should be elsewhere for the winter.”

“Perhaps I should.” That was a good call anyway. Rudi would have some quite serious questions for me, and I had no answers.

The moment of understanding ended. Nobody tried to stop us board our ships, no rockets rose to speed us on our way. We rose, and the sky opened up all around us.

The flight deck was silent until Müüsleri-rattad was a fuzzy grey square in its little valley and the _Wirbelwind_ a droplet of blood in the eastern sky.

“Where to, boss?” said Braganza.

“Let’s pick up the bacon,” I said. “And then... I don't know about you, but I fancy somewhere warm.”


End file.
